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Science & Mathematics

The Museum's collections hold thousands of objects related to chemistry, biology, physics, astronomy, and other sciences. Instruments range from early American telescopes to lasers. Rare glassware and other artifacts from the laboratory of Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen, are among the scientific treasures here. A Gilbert chemistry set of about 1937 and other objects testify to the pleasures of amateur science. Artifacts also help illuminate the social and political history of biology and the roles of women and minorities in science.

The mathematics collection holds artifacts from slide rules and flash cards to code-breaking equipment. More than 1,000 models demonstrate some of the problems and principles of mathematics, and 80 abstract paintings by illustrator and cartoonist Crockett Johnson show his visual interpretations of mathematical theorems.

This game, whose full title is THE PROPAGANDA GAME, was developed by Robert W. Allen and Lorne Greene and is based on the book Thinking Straighter by George Henry Moulds (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Co., 1966). The 1970 edition of the instruction book that accompanies the game was written by Allen, then director of the an academic game project at Nova University in Fort Lauderdale, and Greene, then starring as Ben Cartwright in the long-running TV series Bonanza. It was published by Autotelic Instructional Materials Publishers of New Haven. According to the instruction book, which was first published in 1966, the game was developed by Allen and Greene in Burbank, California, where Allen “was responsible for the experimental mathematics and logic programs in the Burbank United School District” (p. 68). Bob Allen had earlier worked with his brother, Layman E. Allen, on the games WFF ‘N PROOF and EQUATIONS (see MA*335302 and MA*335304).

In My Father’s Voice: The Biography of Lorne Greene (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, Inc., 2004), Linda Greene Bennett wrote that, as reported by Bob Allen, her father said that “we can develop a game where every time someone looked at the newspaper or listened to a broadcast…they could listen to it with more intelligence.” Bob Allen then “developed a game based on a college course he had once taken about linguistic fallacies” (p. 162). The first version of the game was completed in May 1965 and, therefore, preceded QUERIES ‘N THEORIES, the game developed by Layman Allen and others that introduced the basic ideas of linguistics (see MA*335309).

The red plastic game box contains the instruction book, four small tokens, twenty orange example cards, twenty white example cards, and four technique cards, each of which has a “prediction dial” with openings that can display a number 0 through 10. In addition, there is a chart naming levels of clear thinking. The negative range, -5 to -1, represents the “ding-a-ling section,” 0 represents “What the Number Implies,” and 14 through 20 represent various levels of thinkers ranging from a “February 29th Thinker,” through an “Occasional Thinker,” and ending as a “CLEAR THINKER!”.There is also a sheet on which Lorne Greene is pictured and is quoted as declaring

In a democratic society such as ours, it is the role of every citizen to make decisions after evaluating many ideas. It is especially important then that a citizen be able to analyze and distinguish between the emotional aura surrounding the idea and the actual content of the idea. It is to this goal of clear thinking that THE PROPAGANDA GAME addresses itself.

The instruction book defines and gives examples of fifty-five propaganda techniques. A chapter called “Explanation of Techniques” consists of sections devoted to six categories of propaganda technique: self-deception, language, irrelevance, exploitation, form, and maneuver. Within each category of technique there are at least eight different techniques listed. For example, among the ten techniques of exploitation are appeals to pity, flattery, ridicule, prestige, and prejudice. Each of the example cards contains one example for each of the six categories of propaganda technique. Various games are described, all of which are based on players determining which propaganda techniques they think are being used for examples appearing on the example cards. The instruction book has a chapter called “Suggested Answers” that includes explanations of the authors’ choices of the technique used in each of the 240 examples on the cards.

The simplest version of The Propaganda Games is The Solitaire Game in which a player chooses one of the sets of twenty cards and one of the six categories of techniques. The player is read the example on each card for that category and is asked to predict which technique is used in each example. The player wins if the predictions made agree with that of the authors for at least eighteen of the twenty examples.

Over the years the name and location of the distributor of The Propaganda Game changed, although the phrase “Games For Thinkers” has been associated with it from the start. Price lists in the WFF ‘N PROOF Newsletters (part of the documentation in accession 317891) indicate that at first the version was distributed by WFF ‘N PROOF in New Haven, Connecticut, and sold for $5.50. In 1970 the price was raised to $6.50 and in 1971 the game was distributed by WFF ‘N PROOF through Maple Packers in Turtle Creek, Pennsylvania. A firm called Learning Games Associates of Ann Arbor later took over distribution and donated this example to the Smithsonian in 1975. The Accelerated Learning Foundation of Fairfield, Iowa, then became the distributor.

This pocket-sized book, distributed by the firm of Jones and Laughlins of Pittsburgh, Pa., is particularly designed to assist customers of that manufacturer of “steel, iron, and nails, patent cold-rolled shafting, pulleys, hangers and couplings, &c.” The tables were compiled by mechanical engineer C. C. Briggs and, from 1898, revised by F. L. Garlinghouse. Surviving editions date from what may be the third edition of 1878 through the twentieth edition of 1942.

This volume is the eleventh edition, published in 1895. It includes some 487 pages of tables, listing such information for engineers as properties of various forms of iron and steel, material on the flow of water through pipes, formulae for the dimensions of small gears, information needed in the design of railroads, moments of inertia, bending moments and safe loads for beams, dimensions of columns, and strengths of bolts.

More mathematical tables deemed useful concern the circumference and area of circles of differing diameter; square, cubes, square roots, and cube roots of numbers; trigonometric functions; and the logarithms of trigonometric functions. More miscellaneous tables give rates of interest allowed in different states, interest tables, tables for conversions of weights and measures, the time in different places (neglecting the introduction of standard time), the amount of seed required to plant an acre of differing crops, and electoral votes cast in the presidential elections of 1884, 1888, and 1892.

The book of tables was received with a collection of drawing instruments. It is signed in ink inside the front cover: E. O. Hoffmann (/) 1573 - 30th St. N. W. (/) Washington, D. C. (/) 349 Carondelet St. (/) New Orleans, La. (/) U. S. Light House Service.

Aeronautical engineer George Norman Albree (1888–1986) designed airplane components and slide rules. This is an example of his Duplex slide rule, which he intended to be used by grade school children. It is printed on both sides of a cardboard circle and consists of a logarithmic spiral scale for numbers from 10,000 to 32,100 on the front or "A" side and numbers from 31,170 to 100,000 on the back or "B" side. A rotating clear plastic indicator wraps around both sides.

Berenice Abbott's photograph, Pendulum (Small Arc), is a stop-motion photograph. Although the photographer is more well-known for her 1930s abstracted views of New York City's architecture, she wanted to improve the quality of photography for scientists.

Abbott devised apparatus and techniques to capture various phenomena. Beginning in 1958, she created photographs for the Physical Science Study Committee, a program to reform high school physics teaching. This picture illustrating the swing of a pendulum appeared in 1969 in The Attractive Universe: Gravity and the Shape of Space.

Description

During the 1920s, Berenice Abbott was one of the premier portrait photographers of Paris, her only competitor was the equally well-known Dada Surrealist Man Ray who had served as her mentor and employer before she launched her own career. An American expatriate, Abbott enjoyed the company of some of the great twentieth century writers and artists, photographing individuals such as Jean Cocteau, Peggy Guggenheim and James Joyce. One of the critical elements of Abbott’s portraiture was a desire to neither enhance nor interfere with the sitter. She instead wished to allow the personality of her subject to dictate the form of the photograph, and would often sit with her clients for several hours before she even began to photograph them. This straight-forward approach to photography characterized Abbott’s work for the duration of her career.

Thematically and technically, Abbott’s work can be most closely linked to documentary photographer Eugène Atget (COLL.PHOTOS.000016), who photographed Paris during the early 1900s. Abbott bought a number of his prints the first time she saw them, and even asked him to set some aside that she planned to purchase when she had enough money. After his death in 1927, Abbott took it upon herself to publicize Atget’s work to garner the recognition it deserved. It was partly for this reason she returned to the United States in 1928, hoping to find an American publisher to produce an English-language survey of Atget’s work. Amazed upon her arrival to see the changes New York had undergone during her stay in Paris, and eager to photograph the emerging new metropolis, Abbott decided to pack up her lucrative Parisian portrait business and move back to New York.

The status and prestige she enjoyed in Paris, however, did not carry over to New York. Abbott did not fit in easily with her contemporaries. She was both a woman in a male-dominated field and a documentary photographer in the midst of an American photographic world firmly rooted in Pictorialism. Abbott recalls disliking the work of both photographer Alfred Stieglitz and his then protégé Paul Strand when she first visited their exhibitions in New York. Stieglitz, along with contemporaries such as Ansel Adams and Edward Steichen, tended to romanticize the American landscape and effectively dismissed Abbott’s straight photography as she saw it. Not only was Atget’s work rejected by the Pictorialists, but a series of critical comments she made towards Stieglitz and Pictorialism cost Abbott her professional career as a photographer. Afterwards, she was unable to secure space at galleries, have her work shown at museums or continue the working relationships she had forged with a number of magazine publications.

In 1935, the Federal Art Project outfitted Abbott with equipment and a staff to complete her project to photograph New York City. The benefit of a personal staff and the freedom to determine her own subject matter was unique among federally funded artists working at that time. The resulting series of photographs, which she titled Changing New York, represent some of Abbott’s best-known work. Her photographs of New York remain one of the most important twentieth century pictorial records of New York City. Abbott went on to produce a series of photographs for varied topics, including scientific textbooks and American suburbs. When the equipment was insufficient to meet her photographic needs, as in the case of her series of science photographs, she invented the tools she needed to achieve the desired effect. In the course of doing so, Abbott patented a number of useful photographic aids throughout her career including an 8x10 patent camera (patent #2869556) and a photographer’s jacket. Abbott also spent twenty years teaching photography classes at the New School for Social Research alongside such greats as composer Aaron Copland and writer W.E.B. DuBois.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Abbott’s career was the printing of Eugène Atget’s photographs, one of the few instances in which one well-known photographer printed a large number of negatives made by another well-known photographer. The struggle to get Atget’s photographs the recognition they deserved was similar to Abbott’s efforts to chart her own path by bringing documentary photography to the fore in a Pictorialist dominated America. Though she experienced varying levels of rejection and trials in both efforts, her perseverance placed her in the position she now holds as one of the great photographers of the twentieth century.

The Bernice Abbott collection consists of sixteen silver prints. The photographs represent a range of work Abbott produced during her lifetime, including her early portraiture work in Paris, her Changing New York series, Physics and Route 1, U.S.A. series.

William Austin Burt submitted this model of his new equatorial sextant to the U.S. Patent Office in 1856. According to the published patent (#16,002), this instrument could be used to take azimuths, altitude, and time with one observation, and thus enable one to easily obtain the position and bearing of a ship at sea. Burt’s design was ingenious, but this instrument never found much of a market. Burt is better remembered for the solar compass that he introduced in the 1830s.

Ref: John S. Burt, They Left Their Mark. A Biography of William Austin Burt (Rancho Cordova, Ca., 1985), pp. 128-130.

In the spring of 1803, Meriwether Lewis began to purchase scientific and mathematical instruments for a pending expedition into the northwestern region of North America. Among the items he purchased from Philadelphia instrument maker Thomas Whitney were three pocket compasses for $2.50 each, and this silver-plated pocket compass for $5. It has a mahogany box, a silver-plated brass rim that is graduated to degrees and numbered in quadrants from north and south, a paper dial, two small brass sight vanes, and a leather carrying case. Whether Lewis purchased the silver compass for himself or intended it as a special gesture for William Clark is not known.

Following the instructions of President Thomas Jefferson, the Corps of Discovery, under the leadership of Lewis and Clark, ascended the Missouri River in May 1804 to obtain detailed information on the natural resources of the region, to search for a northwest passage, and to make official diplomatic contact with Indian leaders.

By the time they returned to St. Louis in September 1806, few of the instruments that were purchased for the trip had survived the journey. The pocket compass, however, was kept by Clark as a memento. He later gave the compass to his friend, Capt. Robert A. McCabe, whose heirs donated it in 1933 to the Smithsonian Institution.

In 1928, the E. I. DuPont de Nemours Co. hired Wallace Carothers Ph. to conduct pure research in any area of chemistry he chose. His interest was in the construction of long chain polymers, similar to those found in nature. There was no product in mind when he and his team began their work, they simply wanted to learn as much about large molecules as possible. The work done by Carothers and his team lead to the discovery of polyesters and polyamides. DuPont went with the polyamides, and nylon was born. It was the first fiber produced entirely in the laboratory, and was introduced to the public in the form of women's stockings at the 1939 World's Fair. Nylon stockings went on sale May 15, 1940, and were a smashing success. Prior to the production of nylon stockings, American women wore stockings made of silk or rayon. By 1942, nylon stockings were taking twenty percent of the stocking market. With U.S. entry into World War Two, nylon was declared a defense material and withdrawn from the civilian market. Nylon's most famous use during the war was as a replacement for silk in parachutes. However, it was also used in ropes, netting, tire cord, and dozens of other items. So many uses were found for nylon that some referred to it as the "fiber that won the war." When the war ended, nylon stockings were brought back and quickly replaced silk and rayon in the stocking market.

This is the first pair of experimental nylon stockings made by Union Hosiery Company for Du Pont in 1937. The leg of the stocking is nylon, the upper welt, toe, and heel are silk, and cotton is found in the seam. The nylon section of the stocking would not take the silk dye, and dyed to black instead of brown.

In the mid-1960s, most children had never seen an electronic computer. However, they had heard stories of the power of these giant instruments and knew that they were associated with space flight. This toy brought the mathematical principles of the digital computer into the home. The manual describes several problems that could be set up, including a basic check out of whether the device was functioning properly, counting down from 7 to 1 in binary, logical riddles, and the game of NIM. There is a special piece that can be used to represent the logical operation "or." The toy was made by E.S.R., Inc. of Orange and Montclair, New Jersey. It sold for about $5.00.

This engraved woodblock of “Light House Rock in the Canyon of Desolation” was prepared by Henry Hobart Nichols (1838-1887) and the Government Printing Office in Washington, D.C.; the print was published in 1875 as Figure 17 (p.49) in Report of the Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries. Explored in 1869, 1870, 1871, and 1872, under the direction of the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution by John Wesley Powell (1834-1902).

This engraved woodblock of a “Fault with thrown beds flexed upward” was prepared by the Government Printing Office in Washington, D.C.; the print was published in 1875 as Figure 71 (p.184) in Report of the Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries. Explored in 1869, 1870, 1871, and 1872, under the direction of the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution by John Wesley Powell (1834-1902).